U.S. President Donald Trump looks up
toward the Solar Eclipse on the Truman Balcony at the
White House on August 21, 2017 in Washington, DC.
(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump made the demand for more
weapons sound not only ridiculous but also implicitly
racist on Monday when he announced a new branch of the
military—Space Force.

Speaking at a White House meeting of the National
Space Council, Trump
declared, "My administration is reclaiming America's
heritage as the world's greatest space-faring nation,"
and said he urged his "administration to embrace the
budding commercial space industry."

"When it comes to defending America, it is not enough
to merely have an American presence in space. We must
have American dominance in space. So important," he said.

As the U.S. Air Force Space Command currently manages
military operations in space, he said, "We are going to
have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space
Force—separate but equal. It is going to be something. So
important," he said.

"Separate but equal" is the rationale on which Jim
Crow laws rested for decades, so it was a noteworthy
choice of words for an administration facing global
outcry over its
cruel immigration policies that some
argue are rooted in racism.

Trump: “We are going to have the Air Force and we are
going to have the Space Force — separate but equal.”

“Separate but equal” was the racial segregation doctrine
adopted by the Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v.
Ferguson and overturned in 1954 in Brown.
pic.twitter.com/uy8pmfW9Um

Trump also joked that an individual making it to Mars
before the U.S. would be acceptable "as long as it's an
American rich person, that's good."

A Space Force
is not a new idea, and Trump himself
mentioned the idea of such of a military branch in
March, though the administration was against a similar
proposal last year. For his part, Secretary of Defense
James Mattis said last year he
opposed creating a new branch of military for space,
though he also
said last month he wants "to make the military more
lethal in outer space."

Some took to social media to denounce the directive as
merely a distraction from the swelling outrage directed
at the administration's policy to rip children away from
their asylum-seeking parents and send them to prisons.
Others, meanwhile, noted the contrast of the
administration being willing to spend money on a new
branch of military while lawmakers claim a single-payer
healthcare system would be too expensive, and Puerto Rico
is still clamoring to get necessary resources following
Hurricane Maria.

Money for medicare for all? NOPE.
Money to get clean water in Flint? NOPE.
Money for education? NOPE.
Money to stop global warming? NOPE.
Money for a "space force" to combat a nonexistent threat?
You bet your sweet ass.

Of course, as author Belén Fernández recently
argued, the U.S. government has consistently
prioritized "the health of the arms industry over the
health of the humans that are allegedly being defended
from ubiquitous foreign nemeses, only to languish in
sickness and poverty at home."

She further posited that "Trump's latest mission to
convert outer space into a proper 'war-fighting domain'
would seem to fit in rather nicely with mankind's valiant
quest to destroy itself."